Thursday 18 November 2010 20.17 EST
First published on Thursday 18 November 2010 20.17 EST

No government has ever published the Whitehall accounts before. As a moment in history, today could be remembered as a leap forward in the transparency of government – or a masochistic folly.

The coalition came to power promising a "tsunami of data" bringing a new era of transparency to government. It has published spending by the previous government in the enormous Treasury database called Coins, salaries of senior civil servants, staff numbers and the detailed structure of each department. We are beginning to learn who works where in Whitehall, what departments spend and who are the big business recipients of taxpayers' money.

Today is the biggest test of how far the government's transparency agenda goes. The 196,525 lines of data document government spending in the months that the coalition began cutting, enacting freezes on recruitment, consulting and advertising. It reveals that spending has reduced in the promised areas – but also had some unintended consequences: agency costs rising and a buoyant business in the cuts and reform market. There are signs that consultants are gearing up to step in to show civil servants how to make cuts and reforms.

The government is more profoundly exposed than ever before. Civil servants must now wrestle with reconciling the sound principles of publishing the data with the headache of having to explain and justify what each payment is for. The government's aim is to use public scrutiny to drive costs down, forcing officials to consider every cost they incur and giving suppliers an understanding of the market they work in so they may be tempted to undercut rivals.

In achieving this aim it must take some pain. There will be stories about money misspent and occasional glimpses of profligacy. The publication follows months of stories about Labour waste as new ministers crawled through the books and highlighted the potplants, designer sofas and costly contracts their predecessors wasted money on.

There has been criticism of the way some data has been released. The publication of Coins data was so confusing the Treasury had to run seminars on how to use it. Some civil servants are privately critical of the way personnel numbers were released in the early days of the coalition too – "this is incomplete data, being rushed out," said one. And while departmental business plans published this month do contain key data, other key documents such as annual reports and supplementary budgets – which contained more detailed information – have been stopped.

The government chose to release today's data early to independent developers, graphic artists and the data journalism team at the Guardian, who have had embargoed access to it for over a week in order to get some analysis of the data and make it accessible to the public.

The data comes with a health warning: it is not a complete account of government spending. It's about £80bn of an annual spend of £670bn. There is the possibility that some payments are counted twice as they flow between departments. But it is the single most detailed public spending data release in British history and provides unique insights into the complex world of how the government spends your money.

According to figures released today as an act of political transparency, DLA Piper, where Miriam González Durántez is a senior partner, was paid £87,875 during first five months of coalition government

Michael White: The government's accounts are constantly being revised – now they will have to be revised in the shop window, with several million anoraks peering over shoulders and jabbering at the screen 'No, that's wrong'